Digital cameras are used by a growing number of consumer and professional photographers. These cameras use one or more CCD or CMOS image sensors to capture images, and digitally process these captured images to produce digital image files, which are stored in a digital memory in the camera. The digital image files can then be viewed, stored, retrieved, and printed using a home computer, and can be uploaded to a web site for viewing.
The digital camera can include a user control for selecting one or more categories for images to be captured, as described in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 5,633,678 “Electronic Still Camera For Capturing And Categorizing Images” to Parulski et. al., the disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference. Alternatively, the stored digital images can be organized later when they are transferred to the computer using appropriate software. For example, the software can enable images to be organized into categories according to the people, places, subjects or events depicted, as described in a paper entitled “FotoFile: A Consumer Multimedia Organization and Retrieval System” by Kuchinsky et al. The Kuchinsky et al. paper describes metadata attributes that are used to describe certain images, including a “favorite” attribute that is used to indicate the “best” images in a user's collection. However, in the Kuchinsky et al. paper, “favorites” can only be selected when the images are reviewed on the PC, not when they are captured using a camera.
Various types of metadata related to images have been standardized. For example, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) group ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11, “Coding of Moving Pictures and Audio”, has developed an“MPEG-7 Requirements Document” V.8, No. N2727, March 1999, which defines various types of metadata that can be stored with moving images. Also, the Digital Imaging Group (DIG) has developed the DIG35 metadata standard. However, neither of these specifications defines metadata which indicates that an image is a favorite image for a particular user.